[COLUMN] This Summer, The Kids Are Not All Right | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains discussion of the plots - and some twists - of both 28 Years Later and Weapons. These are two of the best films of the year. If you haven’t seen them yet, it might be worth bookmarking and coming back to this piece. It also maybe reveals a key plot point of the recent I Know What You Did Last Summer film, which just released on streaming, but that is maybe less essential viewing.

Now that the summer is over, it’s worth taking a look back at the pop culture season. It’s always interesting to take these films and television shows in aggregate, to look at the trends that simmer and bubble through a wide variety of media, whether consciously or not, and what those themes might say about the anxieties stirring in the collective consciousness. This year, there was a lot of anxiety over children.

Of course, this is to be expected for some films. Most animated and child-centric films tend to focus on a young protagonist in the hopes of providing the target audience demographic with a character who they can root for, and more often than not that means separating these children from their parents or guardians. It is no surprise, for example, that Elio focuses on a young boy (Yonas Kibreab) abducted by aliens and thrust into a high-stakes world that he cannot understand.

However, this summer, more adult-skewing pop culture has been fixated upon the idea of children who have been abandoned or neglected, lost or failed by the adults ostensibly responsible for their care. This is obviously a fairly standard horror trope – placing a child in danger is a great way to escalate dramatic stakes – but this summer there has been a consistency and a commitment to this idea that extends beyond familiar narrative beats.

For example, it was a massive surprise when the horror legacyquel 28 Years Later turned out not to be about actors played by familiar and recognizable stars like Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer or Ralph Fiennes, but instead the 12-year-old character Spike (Alfie Williams). Writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle used their long-promised follow-up to essentially tell a coming-of-age story about a young boy growing up in post-apocalyptic Britain.

Spike is failed by his parents. Spike’s father Jamie (Taylor-Johnson) insists on training Spike in how to kill, fabricating elaborate stories about his son and engaging in an affair with Rosey (Amy Cameron). Spike’s mother Isla (Comer) is suffering from brain cancer, and so is losing her grip on reality. Neither Jamie nor Isla are able or willing to talk to Spike about Isla’s condition, leading to a situation where Spike ventures out into the zombie-infested wilderness with Isla, in pursuit of a cure for her illness.

28 Years Later returns repeatedly to the idea of lost and abandoned children. On their journey through the mainland, Spike and Isla encounter a pregnant infected (Celi Crossland). Isla helps the woman to give birth, producing an uninfected and innocent child. There is a sense that the child could be born – through “the magic of the placenta” – clean of the sins and the taint of her parents. Spike returns the child to the island community where he was raised, as he sets out on his own.

In the world of 28 Years Later, not all children are so lucky. The film opens with a short segment focused on a boy named Jimmy Crystal (Rocco Haynes), whose parents are consumed in the initial zombie attack. His father (Sandy Batchelor), a priest, welcomes the creatures as “a glorious day.” At the end of the film, Spike encounters the now-fully-grown Jimmy (Jack O’Connell), who seems to be the leader of a band of feral youths who model their appearance on child sex offender Jimmy Savile.

28 Years Later pairs nicely with Zach Cregger’s Weapons, a horror movie built around a compelling hook. At exactly 2:17am one morning, 17 children get up, climb out of bed, leave their homes and disappear “into the dark.” Weapons is mostly concerned with the adults who are left behind: Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), the teacher of most of those students; Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), the father of one of the missing children; Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), the principal of their school.

Parental anxiety simmers through Weapons. Justine’s ex, Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), is trying to have a child with his wife Donna (June Diane Raphael). The film opens with narration from an anonymous young girl (Scarlett Sher) and builds to a climactic segment focused on Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), the only member of that class not to disappear. Inevitably, Weapons builds to the revelation that something truly monstrous has taken root in Alex’s home.

The villain of Weapons is ultimately revealed to be Alex’s great-aunt Gladys (Amy Madigal), who is a witch hoping to feed off the lives of the missing children in the hopes of extending her own life. Weapons is fascinated with this idea of parasitism. Right before Gladys pays them a fateful visit, Marcus and his husband Terry (Clayton Farris) are sitting down to watch a nature documentary about ophiocordyceps. It is classic horror movie storytelling; thematic exposition as background noise.

As in 28 Years Later, there is a strong sense in Weapons of adults as either ineffective or actively dangerous. Justine and Archer are no more able to protect the children in their care than Jamie or Isla could protect Spike from the harsh realities of his own world. Gladys is a slightly different sort of monster than the gigantic “alpha” infected (Chi Lewis-Parry) that chases Spike through the post-apocalyptic wasteland in the hope of reclaiming his child, but they are both obvious threats.

Just like Spike in 28 Years Later, Alex is also thrust into a caregiver role beyond his years. When Gladys enslaves his parents (Whitmer Thomas and Callie Schuttera), the duty of caring for them falls to Alex. Alex has to serve them soup, which he buys at the store. There is a particular form of cruelty in this. It is not simply that Alex has been denied his childhood, it is that Alex has been forced to take on responsibilities that his parents should owe to him.

This anxiety about the difficulty protecting children – often from their own parents or relatives – permeates so much contemporary culture.  It recurs in lower budget independent and international horror. In Bring Her Back, Andy (Billy Barratt) lies to his younger sister Piper (Sora Wong) about the abuse he received from his father Phil (Stephen Phillips) while trying to protect her from their abusive foster mother Laura (Sally Hawkins). Once again, Andy is a child forced into a parental role.

In Never Let Go, Nolan (Percy Daggs IV) and Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) navigate their relationship with their mother (Halle Berry), who has constructed an elaborate fantasy about monsters to keep the two children under her control. Speak No Evil is built on the revelation that a seemingly friendly couple (James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi) have been murdering strangers and kidnapping their children. Magnus von Horn’s The Girl With the Needle fictionalizes a real-life story of mass infanticide.

There is an interesting variation upon this theme in recent slashers Clown in a Cornfield and I Know What You Did Last Summer. In both movies, teenage characters are preyed upon by literal or surrogate parents. In Clown in a Cornfield, the kids are subject to a culling by their parents as part of a purification ritual. In I Know What You Did Last Summer, the new young teenage cast are caught within the nostalgic fantasies of Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.), a survivor of the original film.

Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth is similarly fascinated with lost children. The young trillionaire known as “the Boy Kavalier” (Samuel Blenkin) seeks to cheat mortality by placing the minds of children inside fully-grown androids. In an allusion to Peter Pan, he calls these “the Lost Boys”, led by Wendy (Sydney Chandler). The Alien franchise has always been a reproductive horror, even when focused on synthetics like David (Michael Fassbender), but Earth aligns the audience’s sympathy with these confused and disoriented children cast into adult roles far too soon.

This concern about the children extends beyond horror. Steve McQueen’s Blitz tells the story of a biracial boy named George (Elliott Heffernan) lost in the ruins of London in the middle of the Second World War, as his mother (Saoirse Ronan) tries desperately to find him. In Matt Shankman’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Susan Storm (Vanessa Kirby) are offered the chance to save the Earth by sacrificing their newborn son Franklin (Ada Scott).

Obviously, there have always been stories about lost children, but it does feel very pronounced that so many of these movies should come out in such close proximity to one another hitting many of the same central fears. It is perhaps revealing that one of the biggest television shows of the past year was Adolescence, a Netflix streaming series about a community dealing with the aftermath of a horrific crime committed by a young boy named Jamie (Owen Cooper).

Adolescence focuses heavily on the adults around Jamie trying to make sense of what he has done: his father Eddie (Stephen Graham); investigating officer Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters); child psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty). In particular, the show emphasizes the guilt that Eddie feels for failing to protect his son from the insidious philosophies that wormed their way into the boy’s head. “We thought he was safe, didn't we?” Eddie asks his wife Manda (Christine Tremarco).

This is the crux of so much of this wave of contemporary pop culture. Is it possible to keep children safe? Can parents really protect their kids in this day and age? What evils are lurking in the darkness, ready to lure these young innocents to their doom? Adolescence takes these fantastical fears and grounds in something real and contemporary. Still, Eddie is giving voice to the same anxieties that Reed Richards faces in First Steps, the fear that doing a loving father’s best might not be enough.

It makes sense that this anxiety should simmer through so many films and television shows. Adolescence pins this fear to the modern internet, and the possibility that children (especially boys) might be radicalized within the relative safety of their own homes. However, there are also more existential concerns. Parents increasingly worry that they have brought children into a world where they will live appreciably worse lives, struggle to own property and face a climate apocalypse.

There is a fear these children may be worse off because of the world that their parents have made for them. School shootings are widespread, but adults do little to take action that might mitigate these atrocities. The American government has made massive cuts to the Department of Education, made it harder for schools to provide food to students and cut funding for mental health services for schools. Books are being banned, afterschool programs cut, children’s entertainment culled.

These impulses are all driven by an older generation’s nostalgia – “Make America Great Again” – which is unwilling to make any concessions to the needs of an emerging generation. Childhood literacy is in sharp decline. Measle cases are on the rise. Families with children face increasing levels of food insecurity. Child poverty in America doubled in 2022. Children in America are dying at far higher rates than in other wealthy countries.

Obviously, not all of these films and shows are American. 28 Years Later and Adolescence are both British productions. However, Britain faces many of the same challenges in the post-Brexit landscape. Children have been cut off from the opportunities that integration with Europe provided. More than one in three children in the United Kingdom live in deprivation, while the government continues to cut welfare and supports designed to protect children. This is very much a global anxiety.

All of this understandable concern seems to have filtered through into film and television, whether consciously or not. Looking at the mass media of the past year or so, it seems like kids are very much not all right.